Here For The Duration

This is life.

Or the end of it, anyway.

I am in Dallas, TX, at the hospice facility of The Forum, a somewhat upscale retirement home.  I am here with my wife, Ann, at the bedside of her father, who, at age 88, was diagnosed a year with an incurable form of cancer.  After enduring almost a year of chemotherapy and radiation, Jack is now in the final stages of what promises to be his final illness. 

It's been quite a roller coaster over the past few months.  Ann has been back and forth to Dallas a number of times.  In July she was here for almost two weeks.  At the time her father was living in a two-bedroom "Independent Living" apartment at The Forum, with a some of the furnishings from the Highlands Park home he and his wife had lived in for 35 years (Frannie died suddenly two summers ago).  He'd moved to that apartment and had been living comfortably on his own since February. 

I flew down in the middle of July and spent a couple of days with him before driving back with Ann.  Jack was doing pretty well -- as well as could be expected, I guess -- when we left him.  There was one day when he was in severe pain and could hardly move, but once his pain meds were re-balanced he started doing OK again.  He was ambulatory and coherent and pretty much his old curmudgeonly self.

All that changed when Ann got a call informing her that the cancer was now in Jack's brain.  Not two weeks after she'd gotten back from the first trip, she flew down here again, and with her sister and brother, helped to move Jack from his independent living quarters to The Forum's  assisted living quarters. 

But Jack's condition deteriorated rapidly, and less than a week after he'd been moved to assisted living, he was moved to the hospice care floor.

There have been a couple of false alarms in the couple of weeks since that last move to hospice.  There was one time when Ann got a call saying Jack was "unresponsive."  But he opened an eye a few hours later, answered a question, and went back to sleep.  His meds were adjusted again.  Then yesterday Ann got another call saying he was looking "grey" and was unable to lift his arms to feed himself.  About four hours later we had everything in the car and were on our way down here for... well, for the duration, I guess.

We made it to Dallas around midnight last night.  When we got to The Forum at around 8:00 AM, we were pleasantly surprised to see Jack sitting more or less upright in his bed and enjoying his breakfast -- which, unlike the day before, he was feeding himself.  Then we watched some of the coverage of The Speech last night (first look I had at the stadium and the crowd --  the video plays much better on TV than it did listening to audio only via XM Satellite Radio...), and then Jack took a nap.  He woke up just in time to see John McCain introduce the babe he's tapped to be his running mate. 

And then he had lunch and went back to sleep.

And so it goes, and will continue to go.  And Ann and I will probably stay in Dallas until it stops.  Of course there's just no telling how long we'll be here.  That's the nature of this kind of roller coaster.  One minute we think the end is imminent.  The next minute, not so much. 

Sorry if all this sounds depressing or maudlin, but... this is life.  Deal with it.

Sooner or later, we all do.

Comments

[dotise]

birth is hard and death is hard. It's still not clear that life inbetween the two is any easier.

[Christina]

Now I get it (the twitter thing).

I'm very sorry to hear about your wife's father. That's a horrible way to go. I wish him as much peace as he can get during his last days. Thanks for sharing your stories.